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Bandits in the Global Shipping Lanes

Everything seemed fine that spring afternoon as Captain Ken Blyth watched over the loading of his ship in Singapore. He was skippering the Petro Ranger, a medium-size tanker with a $1.5 million cargo of jet fuel and diesel oil bound for Ho Chi Minh City. It was a three-day turnaround. No big deal. After it was over, he'd fly back to his home in Queensland, Australia, to celebrate his 25th wedding anniversary the following week with his wife, Denise.

When the Petro Ranger finally slipped its berth, it was just another cargo vessel amid the daily parade that makes Singapore the busiest port in the world. Not far outside the harbor is the Horsburgh Lighthouse, the last outpost of domestic law. From Horsburgh on, you pass into the only true frontier of the 21st century: international waters -- the no-man's land of the new world economy. Not technically owned or patrolled by anyone, these waters are the last place on earth where you are truly alone.

And given the high technology aboard ship these days, you almost are alone. Blyth sailed with a crew of just 20 men, downsized from the 35 or so he might have needed a few decades ago. The deck of the Petro Ranger is a steel meadow longer than a football field. Toward the stern is the ''accommodation housing'' -- a tall, whitewashed structure with windows that resembles an old apartment building. As a piece of real estate, the Petro Ranger is like a small-town mall with ample parking, pretty much deserted, at sea.

That night, a Malaysian sailor of Indian extraction was the officer of the watch, but instead of performing his duties, he tuned the shortwave to his favorite Indian music station and didn't pay attention to the radar screen -- although, since the ship's funnel creates a blind spot directly in the rear of the vessel, it's not clear what he could have seen. But there was, in the ship's wake, a small blue speedboat. It was made of fiberglass and had no canopy, making radar detection difficult. Throughout the evening, it trawled at the tanker's pace, sitting about a mile back.

At 9:30 p.m., the ship cruised past Horsburgh Lighthouse and headed north. Blyth was relieved and tired. He put the ship on automatic pilot, then showered, crawled into bed and fell asleep. The sea was calm. Just above the captain's quarters was the bridge, where one man was stationed as the lookout. In the nearby chart room, the officer of the watch listened to the comforting drone of a faraway sitar.

Just after 1 a.m., the blue speedboat opened its engines. Cruising straight up the wake, without any threat of detection, it pulled up to the ship's stern. There were 12 pirates on board -- as multicultural as their 18th-century avatars: 7 Indonesians, 3 Malaysians and 2 Thais. They had learned the layout of the ship beforehand and moved with feline grace. Securing bamboo ladders to the stern, the men scrambled to the main deck and leapt upon the outside ladder of the accommodation housing, climbing five stories to the open bridge. Dressed in jeans and T-shirts and with balaclavas pulled over their faces, they appeared in the bridge's doorway. They were armed with machetes. The officer of the watch panicked and fled the chart room by a back exit. The lookout was overtaken in a struggle that thumped the floor loudly enough to awaken the captain below.

Blyth sat up in the dark, thinking perhaps that someone on the bridge had been drinking. He decided to check on his crew. He stood up in his underwear and put on a terry-cloth bathrobe. He stepped through the door of his bunk room into the shadowy twilight of his day room. Suddenly, he was startled by the sound of a loud banging at his door. Instinctively, he unlocked it.

The door blew open. Four hooded pirates waving machetes rushed in. A fifth pirate stepped forward with a gun. He put the barrel to Blyth's head and ordered the captain to place his hands in front of him.

The pirates bound Blyth with boat lacing so quickly that he remembers only one detail. In the moments before the rope touched his wrist, the pirate slipped off his watch and wedding ring as effortlessly as plucking autumn leaves from a tree.

He would remain bound for the next 13 days.

''I still have burn marks on my wrists,'' Blyth recently told me, sitting in the perfectly shipshape living room of his modest home, just a few miles outside Brisbane. His wife, Denise, sat with ankles crossed as he spoke. Their house was clean and fit. Appliances rested beneath knit cozies. Across the room, a plate of sandwiches, each with the crusts cut off, sat beneath a drum-tight stretch of plastic wrap, awaiting our adjournment to luncheon.

Blyth leaned forward from the majesty of his comfy chair to show me the discolorations that lingered two years after that April 17, 1998, night. Blyth, 55, is a tall, blue-eyed Scot, whose Sean Connery accent has endured even if his reddish hair hasn't. He's a tall sailor, all sinew and no bulk. He doesn't laugh easily and radiates a hard-headed intensity.

''The pirates wanted me to go around with the master key -- the one the captain has to unlock any door -- and round up the crew,'' Blyth recalled. ''The idea was that I would knock on the door, tell them not to worry and not to do anything silly. Then the pirates would tell them to get their hands out and tie them up.''

Mohiuddin Ahmed Farooq, the Bangladeshi chief engineer, remembers Blyth's approach as one of the most terrifying moments of his life. He had been reading his favorite professional journal, Marine Engineering Review, when he heard the officer of the watch swoop by his cabin, howling oddly, but dismissed it as some crew prank. Then the second engineer called him on his cabin phone to tell him pirates were on board.

''I told him not to call back because my phone rings so loud,'' Farooq said. He immediately started scheming: ''I brought my shoes back in from outside the door so the pirates might think no one was inside. Then I got all my money together to give them so they wouldn't hurt me. Then I locked my door from the inside and turned off the light.''

Then he heard Blyth just outside. ''With a shivering broken voice, the captain said, 'Chief, chief,' and nothing else,'' Farooq recalled. ''There is a gap of one centimeter below my door, and when I got down and looked, I saw 2 white legs and 8 to 10 colored legs. And then I knew. I switched on the light and opened the door. The captain had four or five knives at his neck. I quietly went to my knees, because I was so much taller than the pirate, and let him tie my hands.''

One by one, every crew member, except for the officer of the watch and an engineer who accompanied two pirates to the engine room, was taken and dumped in the captain's day room.

''When we were passing the laundry door,'' Blyth said, ''suddenly there was the officer of the watch. I have never seen anything like it. His eyes like golf balls! And screaming like someone demented.'' As the machetes quivered at the commotion, Blyth could see that most of the pirates were young and quite agitated. ''My concern was that the officer of the watch was going to upset the pirates. So I stood on his head with one foot and told him to shut up. I kept him down with my foot until the pirates tied him up and took him away.

''Then they took me to the bridge,'' Blyth continued. ''I was still tied up, and then they taped my arms and legs to the chair. They didn't understand how to turn off the automatic pilot, and the pirates were baffled by touch-screen computerized piloting. So I said, 'If you're going to kill me anyway, why should I help?''' Then one of the head pirates told Blyth something that convinced him: the names of his wife and two daughters -- and their street address. ''Here's where it gets surreal. I said I would cooperate, but that I wanted my wedding ring back. So one of the pirates disappeared down the stairs and a few minutes later I felt someone putting the gold band back on my finger.'' Blyth can't quite figure out why he made such a demand. ''When I look back on it,'' Blyth said, ''it was mad.''

The pirates unbound Blyth long enough for him to alter course, taking the Petro Ranger far from the regularly trafficked corridors of international shipping and into the maritime equivalent of a dark alley. By the time the pirates retaped him to the chair, the ship was still steaming northward but no longer on a course for Vietnam. He was served a glass of juice by one of the pirates. Since he was bound to the chair, the pirate poured it for him, sloshing it down his chest. Around this time, Blyth was reassured that they wanted only the cargo. ''That's when all my confusion about why they had kept me was solved,'' Blyth recollected. ''But once they figured out the basics of the navigational equipment, I wondered, Would I go over the side?'' He sat up in his easy chair, the only sound the slight crinkle of a single cigarette paper. He sprinkled some tobacco in it and rolled it in a single motion. ''This is how dopey your mind works in these circumstances. I'm thinking: Would the chair float with me or be too heavy? Would I have enough time to get the tape off my leg? Of course the bottom line was I'd have been sucked straight into the propeller.'' He licked his rolling paper.

''Then they stuck a cigarette in my mouth -- and I'd quit smoking for 16 months -- and they lit it for me.'' Blyth took a big drag on the one he'd just rolled; the slightest curl of a smile appeared, possibly remembering that one Great Cigarette, possibly in the triumph of being able to tell me this story. ''That cigarette,'' he said, ''was better than an orgasm.''

After learning how to navigate the ship, the pirates took Blyth back to his bunk, where nearly all his crewmen, taped and tied, were crammed into his day room, sitting up ''like zombies.'' Being the captain, he was permitted the luxury of being tossed on his own bed where, by some magic he cannot remember, he fell asleep.

''When I awoke, I could see that a movie was on in the day room,'' Blyth continued. ''I heard sounds like cattle dogs getting on with the sheep.'' Three young pirates stood among his bound crew, drinking and eating out of his private fridge while watching television. ''All I could hear was grunts and groans -- and then I realized they were watching a blue movie.'' Sitting up in his underwear and robe with his chest a sticky mat of juice, ash and sweat, Blyth said, ''I just looked and looked and thought, Am I dreaming?''

One of the pirates realized that Blyth was awake and stepped away from the movie, irritably demanding that Blyth give him the combination to the ship's safe. When Blyth told him that the safe was broken and that he kept the ship's store of cash in a briefcase, the pirate grew enraged. He smashed Blyth in the head with the handle of the machete and knocked him out cold.

Hours later, when Blyth woke up again, he was taken to his men in the mess hall, which had been filled with mattresses. Guards were positioned at the door, and new procedures were explained. One hand would be freed when a crewman had to use the bathroom. The only time their hands were completely untied was for a brief shower. Lights blazed 24 hours a day, making sleeping difficult. A bootleg copy of ''Titanic,'' the only nonpornographic entertainment on board, played over and over again like water torture.

The pirates had taped over the portholes, but the captain once saw through a crack in the tape over the bathroom porthole that the bottom half of his ship's identifying blue funnel had been painted red. And could he have seen the stern, he would have found that the Petro Ranger no longer existed. He was now aboard the ''Wilby,'' just another vessel bobbing along without notice in international sea lanes. Over the next several days, changes in the weather and the flies buzzing in through the vents were enough to convince Blyth that they were nearing the China coast. Blyth theorized that the pirates intended to meet some black-market tankers to offload the fuel cargo. They would need Blyth and his crew to help make that transfer. But then what?

Piracy on the high seas resurfaced in the mid-1980's and in recent years has ratcheted up to a true crisis both for shippers and recreational yachtsmen. In 1989, there were 48 acts of piracy reported around the world; in 1999, there were 285. So far this year, it's up by 40 percent. Consider what havoc Blyth's hijacking caused the parent company, Petroships of Singapore. It operates only nine ships, according to C.M. Tan, the executive director, and suddenly one just seemed to disappear. ''We thought the ship was on its way to Vietnam,'' Tan said. ''When the ship didn't show up at the scheduled time, we frantically tried to contact the Petro Ranger but heard nothing.''

The cause of piracy's revival is no different from its appearance centuries ago. Ships serving the top trading nations (England, Holland and Spain in the old days; America, Germany and Japan now) are transiting through a global geography of poverty, envy and desperation. Often these vessels are carrying on board a king's ransom of commodities -- no longer cinnamon, indigo and flax, but jet fuel, alkali and aluminum ingots -- all easily black-marketed into quick money. And they are forced to travel through infamous areas, from the Strait of Malacca to the South China Sea, that inspire the same feelings of dread as did the legendary danger zones: Sherwood Forest in the 12th century, the Caribbean Sea in the 17th century, downtown Detroit in the 1980's.

Modern piracy ranges from desperate fishermen pulling off petty larcenies at sea to highly organized syndicates slaughtering crews to steal multimillion-dollar vessels. Today's pirates are a troubling symptom of a new world order, one shaped by a fierce Darwinian struggle in the feral markets of modern international trade.

Most piracy is of the mugging-at-sea variety. The pirates just zip up in a speedboat, point a rocket launcher at the hull and demand money. Lately it has been getting a little rougher. Last January, an Australian couple were sailing around the world. In the Gulf of Aden off Yemen, a small powerboat pulled up beside the couple's catamaran; a burst of machine-gun fire tore through the hull, wounding the wife. Four pirates boarded the boat, ripped out some high-tech communications equipment, then left.

Getting aboard a huge ship is easy if you have an expensive speedboat. But even the poorest fishermen know a simple tactic that is reported more frequently these days. Two sets of pirates get in two sampans and stretch a rope across a sea lane in the dark. When a big cargo vessel finally comes through, it catches the rope at the bow and neatly pulls the two boats right alongside. The pirates then heave up grappling irons, climb aboard and in the quiet of night clean the boat of everything portable. When they are finished, they just drop down to the boats and untie one of the lines. The sampans are immediately left in the big ship's wake, and then they row back home, where a can of paint might fetch the equivalent of a week's pay.

Beats fishing.

Of course, more ambitious pirates realize that stealing some watches and shipboard cash is small stakes when you're dealing with a huge vessel carrying cargo worth millions. Often the pirates will contract with black marketeers to hawk the cargo. And they also want the ship. This may mean repainting it at sea, obtaining fake registration papers and then selling it or just using it themselves to become seemingly legitimate shippers. This process, known as phantom shipping, is costly and dangerous, requiring serious planning and organization.

The more sophisticated forms of piracy are carried out by Southeast Asian syndicates and Chinese triads. According to a 1998 report on piracy published by the International Chamber of Commerce, the corporate-style organization of the syndicates is impressive: ships can ''be hijacked to order in the Philippines for about $300,000 and delivered within three days.''

The global reaction to the piracy revival has been, by all accounts, slow. A United Nations committee in Vienna has been working for years to develop policy on transnational organized crime. But according to a State Department official who declined to be identified, ''It is not addressing this issue.'' Since few ships serving American companies are registered in the United States, he explained, ''piracy has not reached out and touched enough people here to drive it up the political flagpole.''

So the pirates aren't too scared. Ships disappear pretty regularly and with impunity. Once a ship has been captured, the crew faces one of two fates. In the case of the tanker Global Mars, which was seized by pirates last Feb. 23, the 17 crewmen were bound and blindfolded before being set off in lifeboats. But the 21 crew members of the Hualien No.1, which disappeared with a cargo of river sand last Feb.28, have never turned up and are now presumed dead. Most seamen know such stories. They hear them and can't believe it will ever happen to them. Ken Blyth was certainly thinking about them when one of the junior pirates told him that their leader wished to see him at once.

The Pirate King

Blyth was escorted to his own day room, where the pirates had set up their headquarters. The pirate king was 49 years old, a well-educated and heavyset Indonesian of medium height. He spoke four or five languages, including grammatically perfect English. The pirate king's name, Blyth would learn, was Herman.

The two men sat down and had a cup of coffee. Blyth began negotiating right off. The ropes were cutting into their wrists. Herman agreed to a less chafing form of homemade handcuffs, a restraint using a rubber O-ring and strong tape. After such business was out of the way, Blyth was surprised that Herman wanted to linger and chat a little.

''The impression I got,'' Blyth told me, ''was that having achieved what he had done -- the Petro Ranger was the most modern tanker he'd swiped -- he would have loved to phone up CNN and say, 'Look what I pulled off.' He was so exhilarated he wanted to share it with someone. I was the only one around who could possibly appreciate what he'd done.''

Right away Blyth realized that with the mildest prodding, Herman would provide details that he thought were irrelevant. Blyth learned that the junior pirates were basically thugs. The kid who'd knocked Blyth out had been released from a Malaysian prison just three days before. Herman would later order the boy to apologize to Blyth for striking him. Blyth then understood that four of the pirates were in leadership positions. These were the ones carrying guns. Herman and a second officer were the brains of the operation; the other two, Blyth surmised, were executioners. The junior thugs spoke no English and were only trusted to wield machetes. The two pirate engineers who were operating the ship turned out to be legitimate sailors who had signed on to what they thought was a real charter contract. In other words, they'd been press-ganged, just like in the good old days.

Sometimes Herman would try to joke with Blyth. Noticing some dates written on the captain's blackboard, Herman asked about them to learn that they were the dates of Blyth's return flight to meet his wife. ''I wish I could send a message for you, but you know the predicament I'm in,'' Herman said.

The syndicate he worked for, he went on to explain, had five men in leadership positions: one each from China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. He claimed that they had ''inside access'' to Petroships, the shipping company. They knew that the Petro Ranger would be sailing with a simple commodity -- fuel -- easily fungible on the black market. They knew the date of embarkation. They knew all about Blyth and most of the crew. Herman had all the documents he would need: registration for the ''Wilby,'' papers that identified Herman as the legitimate captain along with his crew and bills of lading identifying the cargo on board as part of a legitimate charter.

Blyth was returned to his mattress, quite impressed by the extent of Herman's operation. One thing worried him, though. Why would Herman tell him all this if he didn't also intend to kill him?

If piracy has its formal organization in syndicates, then the Piracy Reporting Center in downtown Kuala Lumpur is its attempted complement, part of the emerging antipiracy infrastructure. Founded in 1992 by a collective of shipowners and other maritime interests, the Piracy Reporting Center documents hundreds of reported pirate attacks every year. They man a 24-hour hotline for captains to call for help at sea and maintain a Web site filled with fresh accounts of piracy. To visit its office is to get a broad sense of where modern piracy originated.

Not far from the Piracy Reporting Center's headquarters stand the Petronas Towers, the tallest buildings in the world. Kuala Lumpur's skyline may be more prominently marked, however, by a bank tower whose pinnacle glows with the bespectacled visage of Colonel Sanders. The fried-chicken baron looms three stories high, bearing the same half-smile found on Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, whose image is posted behind every cash register in Kuala Lumpur. It's no longer clear which icon holds the most sway.

''The governments in Southeast Asia have simply been incapable of handling this huge, Chicago-in-the-20's-like explosion of economic growth,'' said one veteran shipper. And no greater proof can be found than the world map in the lobby of the Piracy Reporting Center, where every pirate attack is marked by a red pushpin. Looking at the map this spring, I noticed that the oceans familiar to me were pin-free, whereas the areas around Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia were perforated beyond recognition.

A clean-cut Malaysian named Noel Choong, himself a former sailor, emerged to introduce himself. He was dressed in a white shirt and a pricey-looking gold-and-black tie. His neat shiny black hair had a bluish tint.

''Every day we send out a 'sitrep' -- situation report -- via satellite and transmit it to all the ships on all the oceans,'' he said. ''We advise them of current events, what ships have reported pirate attacks, that sort of thing.''

Occasionally, Choong's office lights up with action. Last October, the Japanese captain of the Alondra Rainbow was able to alert the Piracy Reporting Center to a hijacking at sea right after his ship was seized by bandits. After the sitrep went out, some captains in the region radioed back sightings of a ship vaguely matching the description. ''We pieced a lot of other bits together and were convinced that the ship was one spotted steaming toward India,'' Choong said. ''We contacted the Indian Coast Guard to intercept it, and they sent out a patrol boat. When the ship saw the patrol boat, they altered course for international waters and maintained radio silence. So the patrol boat gave chase. After a while they radioed that they were from the Philippines, but Manila said there was no such ship originating there. Then they said they had a Belize registry, but there was no ship by that name registered there. So we decided to fire warning shots across the bow. Still they proceeded full speed ahead. We sent an aircraft up and followed the ship. We shot at the hull and still it wouldn't stop. The patrol boat maintained the chase for two days.''

Ultimately, the chase lasted three and a half weeks. Choong said that the Piracy Reporting Center facilitated several multinational meetings, including one requesting intervention by the United States naval forces stationed in Bahrain. But before America could accept, an Indian Navy vessel fired cannon rounds at the ship off the coast of Goa. Hit, the pirates scuttled the ship and set afire all the documents on board. The disabled vessel was towed to India; the pirates are currently in Bombay awaiting trial.

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During my visit, Choong loaded me up with sitreps, weekly reports, quarterly reports and annual reports -- making it clear that most of what he does is report the attacks, after the fact. And Choong's charts underscored the clear connection between economics and piracy. In the early 90's, the number of attacks hovered around 100 each year; then in 1995, when the Pacific recession hit hard, the number shot up to 188 and has been bounding upward ever since.

''Ninety-five percent of pirates are armed,'' Choong said, ''and will not hesitate to use weapons to escape.'' The captured seamen may end up like the crew of the Global Mars, set adrift. Or maybe like the sailors aboard the Cheung Son, a furnace-slag cargo ship. ''The pirates murdered the entire crew,'' Choong explained. ''The head pirate wanted everyone on his team implicated, so he systematically forced each pirate to kill one crewman. Some were shot, some stabbed to death. What most of the pirates did was cover the crews' heads with bags and then club them to death like monkeys.''

How did international trade get to this point? For one thing, the frontier marketplace of modern shipping has provided pirates with plenty of targets. Roughly 40,000 ships move almost all the world's trade across the largest stage possible, the seven seas. Piracy erupting in such an environment was as likely as the 19th-century explosion in train robberies after the Wild West became scored by miles of unprotected railroad lines.

And although the precise catalyst that set off modern piracy is hard to identify, some point to the Vietnamese diaspora of the late 70's and early 80's. Around that time, Southeast Asian fishermen grew desperate, as their once stable livelihoods became shackled to the boom-bust cycle of the new global economy. Horrific stories began surfacing in the international press: a single girl would be found at sea, for example, and tell of being on a boat boarded by ''fishermen'' who robbed everyone and then went crazy, raping the women and pulling the gold from men's teeth before finally tossing everyone into the shark-infested sea. When the wave of boat people finally subsided, the criminals at sea had completed a kind apprenticeship in maritime robbery and murder. It makes grim sense that these bandits would graduate to the larger vessels crowding the sea lanes -- cargo ships and tankers.

The Great Escape

After a week of sleeping in the continuous white light of ceiling lamps and the flicker of the perpetual ''Titanic'' showing, Blyth realized time was running out. Somewhere at sea, two tankers had pulled up alongside for cargo transfers. Blyth and his chief officer had been forced to help offload thousands of tons of fuel, a task made more difficult by the thought that the faster it was accomplished, the sooner they were likely to die.

A third tanker was delayed, Blyth learned. The deposed captain's radio man would occasionally report back what he was gleaning from working alongside the pirates (like the unsettling fact that Herman had two machine guns hidden in the radio room). The Petro Ranger idled at sea for several days. Then, on the 13th day of the crew's captivity, one of the pirates made a huge mistake. With the third tanker sailing around unable to find the ''Wilby,'' the No.2 pirate called the tanker on the public VHF frequency. The Chinese heard him.

Not long afterward, a Chinese patrol vessel stopped, boarded and inspected the Petro Ranger. But Herman handled it smoothly. He locked Blyth and a few of his men down below in crew cabins. He presented papers indicating that he was the captain and passed off both Blyth's legitimate sailors and his own henchmen as his crew. (The pirates kept Blyth's crew in check by routinely reminding them that they knew the whereabouts of their wives and families. Herman could be vicious in this regard. He once told Farooq that he'd just visited the chief engineer's cabin, menacingly adding that he'd seen the pictures of his beautiful wife and two children. Farooq managed to retrieve the pictures but Blyth urged him to put them away. ''The captain told me, 'Looking at them will only make you weak,' and he was right,'' Farooq said.)

Suspecting a smuggling operation, the Chinese withdrew and waited to see what might happen. When the third tanker did arrive, the Chinese sped in, stopped both ships at sea, and escorted them to Haikou harbor on the island of Hainan in southern China.

Since the Chinese were now convinced that the ''Wilby'' was a smuggling ship, Herman quietly contacted his syndicate and got a lawyer to facilitate the usual round robin of bribes. Blyth learned all this from, of course, Herman, who enjoyed summoning the captain back to the day room to boast about his caginess.

The problem for Blyth now was simple. If Herman pulled this off, then the ''Wilby'' would push out to sea and they would all surely be killed. For help, Blyth turned to two of his crew members: a big Ghanian known as Benny and a trim young Malaysian named Saini.

''I decided I had to get to the Chinese,'' Blyth recalled, ''and then I could only hope that I was in fact getting to the good guys, the ones who weren't corrupt.'' Saini, who spoke a little Mandarin, managed to get close enough to a Chinese lieutenant on board to tell him to meet at midnight on the top of Monkey Island, the colloquial name for the roof of the bridge.

The pirate guards checked on Blyth every half hour or so. Often that meant just jiggling the handle on the door to make sure it was still locked. Knowing this, Blyth, Benny and Saini concocted a ''Mission: Impossible''-like plan.

Blyth explained it to me this way: ''What was to happen was that Saini would check where the pirates were, and when the stairwell to the bridge was clear, I would hear three bangs on the door. Then I'd unlock it from the inside and we'd all take off.'' The scheme began as planned; Saini and Blyth ran barefoot to minimize noise.

''Saini and I moved quickly to the bridge, while Benny went back into my cabin and locked the door from the inside so that if they tried the handle, it would be locked and everything would seem dinki-di.'' (Also, if the plan failed, Blyth would be able to return to his cabin without deadly repercussions from Herman.)

Saini and the captain bolted up to Monkey Island, where the Chinese lieutenant was keeping watch and was more than a little surprised to have a tall Scot appear in the doorway.

''Saini explained who I was,'' Blyth recalled, ''and I gave him my passport and some Malaysian documents stating I had command of the Petro Ranger, which the pirates had neglected to destroy. Once I had made contact and we knew I wouldn't have to go back to the cabin, Saini rushed down to get Benny. They rolled up a blanket and put it in my bed. They locked the door from the inside, walked out, then gently pulled it shut. Then Saini went to his cabin and Benny to his. The only person missing was me.

''The Chinese then developed their own plan,'' Blyth said, in order to minimize any chance of gunfire. ''They dressed me in a Chinese army uniform and asked me to sit down atop Monkey Island. From below, the pirates could only see the silhouette of me in battle fatigues and the army hat, which was distinctively Chinese.''

The next morning, Chinese soldiers came to the ship. Blyth was still safe atop Monkey Island. Peering over the railing, he watched as the Chinese herded first Herman and his ''officers'' and then nearly the entire mix of pirates and legitimate crew onto their boat. Told they were simply going ashore to sign documents granting port clearance, they easily complied as 30 armed soldiers held their weapons at the ready.

The Chinese lieutenant then called out to Blyth, who stood up. We are left to imagine what Herman must have been thinking when he looked up to see the faraway Chinese guard descend to the deck as Ken Blyth. The captain calmly strode to his gunnel and pointed at each man in turn, identifying him as either pirate or crew.

Preventing an attack from a pirate like Herman is not easy (and catching him after he has struck often requires the kind of cunning and good luck Blyth had). Standard preattack precautions range from keeping a constant watch to pressurizing the ship's water supply so crew can hose pirates off the side of the vessel when they start climbing up the ropes.

The latest technological fix is the onboard tracking system, a kind of Lojack at sea. One such device, called the Shiploc, was recently installed on all nine vessels owned by Petroships. Several companies offer variations of it -- Seajack Alarm, Fleet Remote Monitoring System, ShipTrac. But in general, few shippers use them. Shipowners are no different from most of us who simply believe that bad things happen to other people. What's more, no ship with the feature has ever been attacked by pirates, so it remains untested in the real world.

Beyond that, the latest ship designs coming out of London appear ready to turn your average vessel into the maritime equivalent of a Humvee cruising through the guarded sanctuaries of a gated community. Blueprints from the offices of John McNeece, a noted ship designer, incorporate the following improvements: heat detectors, vapor sniffers, a 60-meter high-intensity light zone, escape pods -- and even attack weapons.

Carl Hunter, a veteran shipper based in London, is starting a company named Anglo Marine Overseas Services, which will lease out Gurkhas to guard cargo ships. Even in these postcolonial days, the British maintain three battalions of these Nepalese soldiers notorious for their headlong audacity. The idea is the opposite of Shiploc. Rather than conceal from the pirates the fact that the ship has some added protection, Hunter's company seeks very much to tell them. Each ship that employs his men will be permitted to fly the Gurkha insignia. On a plain field, it shows two kukri -- those wavy Nepalese knives -- crossed at the blades. The flag would serve as a kind of reverse Jolly Roger.

Would the Gurkhas have guns? ''I am not hiring out mercenaries,'' Hunter said. ''Obviously I don't want to say outright that these men are not armed, because that would hinder their deterrent effect. But I am not in the mercenary business. There are others doing that.''

Two others, to be precise. Satellite Services is a Dutch firm that will rent out 225 former peacekeeping troops whose combat experience includes the battlefields of Bosnia. But perhaps the most notorious is Marine Risk Management, located in Oxton, England, next door to Liverpool. The company is run by a bearish man named John Dalby (whose eerie resemblance to Bill Clinton is, in an interview setting, disturbing). Most of the day, Dalby is a repo man, container-ship style: he reclaims vessels when an owner has missed several mortgage payments. Three years ago, however, his company added a ''rapid response service'' to handle pirate attacks.

''So far we've had four calls,'' Dalby said of his new enterprise. He agreed to describe ''the gung-ho, Errol Flynn concept of what we do'' and took me out to his favorite restaurant in Oxton, where we dined on legs of mutton as cartoonishly huge as a Henry VIII dinner imagined by a Hollywood director.

''I don't want to sound bigheaded, but we are just known,'' he said. ''We don't advertise. The client comes to us after a ship has been pirated. We talk on the telephone and then outline what we can do. Generally we can have a team to the problem area within 24 hours.''

Dalby uses a Falcon 900B executive jet to move his team -- which is composed of 8 to 12 men, all of whom have served in England's Special Boat Squadron, the equivalent of the United States Navy Seals. He wouldn't say how much he charged for an ''action.'' But he did say at one point, ''We earn more money from one antipirate rapid response than-- ''He burst out laughing, ogled the waitress and washed down some mutton with shiraz.

''We assume that the cargo's been sold in advance,'' he continued. ''That determines where the ship's going to go. So we get our local spies on alert. They are listening for rice in the marketplace, you know what I'm saying?'' I didn't know what he was saying, but ''listening for rice'' sounded so cool, I just nodded furiously, ogled the waitress and tore into my mutton.

''And then suddenly a rice dealer somewhere says that rice will be available at a discount. Now we are pretty sure where the ship will go. Once our guys locate the ship, they conduct reconnaissance,'' he said, explaining that if it's in port, then the team just watches it. ''You never try to snap a ship back in port. If they have tugboats, then someone in the local government regime is probably involved. So it's dangerous. We'd send two guys to look at the ship to see if it's the original crew, pirates or a mix. They might just set a ship-tracking device on board. Then they report back, and we discuss future strategy.''

In one particular reseizure, Dalby's men boarded a pirated ship at sea posing as drug-enforcement inspectors. The pirates handled it calmly, while Dalby's men managed to plant a tracking device. They then fell back and watched the ship on computer for days. When it was within Indonesian waters, the owners contacted the national navy and had it seized.

If the decision is made to retake the ship, Dalby's men are prepared to do it: ''Our guys can pirate ships better than the pirates can.'' Dalby's men can secure a bridge and an engine room quickly and then throw the ship into darkness. ''The pirates can panic,'' he said, ''but they're just running around a pitch-black ship. It's worse than a cave. There are so many traps. They're afraid. And we have night sights.''

''We operate under the same lack of rules as the pirates. So they're just getting hoisted by their own petard.''

Trouble in Port

Not long after the chinese officials arrested the pirates, Blyth was taken ashore and interrogated by two different law-enforcement agencies: the People's Liberation Army, all dressed in green outfits, and the Public Security Bureau, distinguished by khaki. Days of repetitive interviews and odd accusations -- at one point, a P.S.B. official suggested that Blyth had made the whole pirate thing up -- gave the captain the impression his ship had become ensnared in a major power play. The P.L.A. was deeply concerned with how this might look internationally (and were, therefore, sort of on Blyth's side). The P.S.B., however, seemed more beholden to provincial powers in southern China, which are widely suspected not only of tolerating piracy but also of organizing it.

A State Department official I spoke with confirmed Blyth's on-site analysis. ''China has a huge economic interest in trade, especially by sea,'' the official said. ''On the other hand, locally it has -- how shall we say? -- an old way of doing business. The central government is trying to do something about it, but it's difficult, and it's not always clear how devoted they are to it when push comes to shove, with money.''

In the Petro Ranger's case, what finally happened still baffles those involved, and yet the outcome exposes the difficulty of suppressing piracy in a globally gilded economy. ''If I may say so,'' said Petroships' Tan, who flew to China to personally handle Blyth's case, ''the Chinese authorities were totally irresponsible and deplorable.''

After learning of his ship's location more than two weeks after its disappearance, Tan flew at once to Haikou. His experience in China ranged from having Petroships accused of collaborating with pirates to being physically thrown out of a government building. In the end he retrieved his stolen ship -- but the Chinese kept all of the remaining 5,100 tons of fuel, nearly half the original cargo, as ''evidence'' before waiting some time and selling it off. In reaction to such cases, the International Chamber of Commerce has written that either this is a ''result of inefficiency and infighting amongst the seemingly inept Chinese authorities concerned, or part of a deeper plot to cover up China's participation in criminal activity.''

Tan was luckier in some respects that the owners of the Anna Sierra, which was ''saved'' from pirates by the Chinese in 1996. In that case, the cargo was sold and the authorities even refused to permit the owners to reclaim the ship. Without care, it took on water and to this day the ship remains beached in Beihai harbor in southern China, a rusting monument to the inadequacy of policing modern piracy.

Tan believes that the ease of piracy stems from the notion that few countries are willing to risk a serious diplomatic incident by treating foreign nationals -- even pirates -- as criminals. Others agree. ''What do you do,'' Dalby asked, almost sympathetically, ''if you're the Malaysian government asking the Indonesian government to send in gunboats to deal with a Korean shipment aboard a ship registered in Belize with a Japanese captain, and then the Philippine government gets nervous because some of the crew is Filipino? Here's what you do: nothing.''

This year, things appeared to change. During another routine smuggling arrest, the Chinese discovered that they had captured the pirates responsible for the brutal murders of the crew of the Cheung Sun in 1998 (the pirates had actually taken pictures of the killings and kept them around). The pirates were tried and sentenced to die. In January, China signaled its regional trading partners to the new zero-tolerance pirate policy by inviting photographers to witness what would become a surreal execution. The young pirates were allowed to get drunk on rice wine and broke into a rowdy version of the Ricky Martin song ''La Copa de la Vida.'' A few minutes later, each was tied to a chair and shot in the head and heart. All but one of the pirates was Chinese, however, making it less than a full international crisis to execute them. And, in light of subsequent events, the trial seems more public relations than tough justice.

Earlier this month, the Chinese announced that they had found the Global Mars, a tanker missing since Feb. 23. Then they admitted that they had actually seized the ship in May and had been holding the 20 pirates -- 11 Filipinos, 9 Burmese -- for just as long. When asked whether these pirates would be tried, extradited or released, an officer with the Zhuhai Frontier Police who would only identify himself as Zhang said, ''I'm not sure about that.'' He quickly added, ''That's not our decision.''

No less an authority than Captain Blyth said he knew what would probably happen. He laughed into the telephone when he heard that the pirates were being ''held'' for further interrogation.

''I remember the last time I saw Herman,'' he said. ''The authorities had beaten him severely. I don't know if they used electricity or not, but he looked like he'd aged 10 years. They prodded him with the butt of a rifle to move along. They didn't have handcuffs on him. They didn't need them. He could hardly walk. I didn't make eye contact because he never looked up.'' And yet, four months after Blyth went home, the Chinese authorities quietly released Herman and all of his men. The Chinese have refused to explain why they would let the pirates go, as they have done repeatedly in the past. A Chinese official contacted recently for a comment pronounced the question ''ridiculous.''

''One of my old crew members phoned me up in early August,'' Blyth said. ''He's still at sea, and he told me that five of our pirates, three of the Malaysians and the two Thais, have been spotted doing piracy again, working the waters between Port Dickson and Port Klang near Kuala Lumpur. You just can't believe it, but they're back out there.''